BERLIN (Reuters) – The poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny requires an international reaction and must not be treated as a German-Russian conflict, Germany’s foreign minister said when asked why sanctions proposals against Russia did not mention the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Paris and Berlin said on Wednesday they would propose European Union sanctions against Russian individuals after receiving no credible answers from Moscow over the Navalny poisoning with a nerve agent.
“For us it is important that these are not German-Russian consequences that we draw but that these are European ones,” Heiko Maas said at the Globesec Tatra summit in Bratislava on Thursday, according to a translation into English.
Russia has denied accusations by Navalny that it was involved in poisoning him in August.
(Reporting by Kirsti Knolle; editing by Thomas Seythal)
